Reporter: A Memoir

by Seymour M. Hersh

The mainstream newspapers, magazines, and television networks will continue to lay off reporters, reduce staff, and squeeze the funds available for good reporting, and especially for investigative reporting, with its high cost, unpredictable results, and its capacity for angering readers and attracting expensive lawsuits.

I should note here that I am in no way a fanatic, or a prude about lying, and realize that human beings lie all the time. We all know the clichés about the big fish that one caught or the low golf score. My brother and I learned early in life that our mother lied repeatedly, especially about store-bought cookies she claimed to have baked. Not a big deal. I happen to believe, innocently perhaps, that official lying or authorized lying or understood lying about military planning, weapons systems, or intelligence cannot be tolerated. I cannot look the other way.

And then this long-suffering mother, who did not follow the news and knew little of the war in Vietnam, said it all: “I sent them a good boy, and they made him a murderer.”

revealed highly classified evidence reporting that Iraq had used a nerve agent in its war with Iran—the United States supported Iraq at the time—and had been buying laboratory equipment for the production of the agent from a West German company. The intelligence, gathered from satellite coverage, had been presented three times within a week to President Reagan without any indication he had read it, forcing CIA officials to redline the most pressing issues in the President’s daily intelligence brief that they prepared, which he apparently was not reading. (I was told at the time, but did not verify, that the White House’s national security aides eventually found a way to engage the President—by having the daily CIA intelligence brief recorded on a videotape and screened on TV for him.)

Everything old is new again.

I was in the process then of researching what would become a searing report about Bush’s April visit. The former president was seen by many Kuwaitis as a hero who had rescued Kuwait from imminent attack by authorizing the First Gulf War in August 1990 and vanquishing the regime of Saddam Hussein. The victory also was seen as America’s most successful foreign war since Vietnam. Bush was invited to do a victory lap and flew to Kuwait in April on a special flight, paid for by Kuwait, that was crammed full of former aides, family members, and hangers-on, each of whom was greeted with a gold Rolex watch. There were bigger targets of sleaze: Kuwait’s oil industry had been torn apart in the war, and James Baker, Bush’s secretary of state, was on the hunt for rebuilding contracts potentially worth billions on behalf of the Enron Corporation, one of his consulting clients. Marvin Bush, the President’s son, was lobbying on behalf of two Texas oil equipment firms that had been using the Bush name in prior bidding efforts. “I was embarrassed,” an American banking official told me when I visited Kuwait after the President’s visit. “Kuwaitis were snickering after dinner. We take such a self-righteous view in international business: ‘We don’t do family deals, and we don’t take tips.’ And then to have the President’s children and the secretary of state come to Kuwait to get handouts…”

A few months after the invasion of Iraq, during an interview overseas with a general who was director of a foreign intelligence service, I was provided with a copy of a Republican neocon plan for American dominance in the Middle East. The general was an American ally, but one who was very rattled by the Bush/Cheney aggression. I was told that the document leaked to me initially had been obtained by someone in the local CIA station. There was reason to be rattled: The document declared that the war to reshape the Middle East had to begin “with the assault on Iraq. The fundamental reason for this…is that the war will start making the U.S. the hegemon of the Middle East. The correlative reason is to make the region feel in its bones, as it were, the seriousness of American intent and determination.” Victory in Iraq would lead to an ultimatum to Damascus, the “defanging” of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, and other anti-Israeli groups. America’s enemies must understand that “they are fighting for their life: Pax Americana is on its way, which implies their annihilation.” I and the foreign general agreed that America’s neocons were a menace to civilization.